Testing the Two-Step Model of Marketing Krishna Consciousness in Europe

Abstract

Krishna Consciousness is a new religious movement, which has gained higher and higher importance in the past decades in Europe. During multiple researches between 2013 and 2020 (Bence, 2014; Bence-Kiss, 2020) a two-step model was identified, in which Krishna-conscious communities of Europe attract people outside the religion as tourists to rural communities in the different countries, where they gain more knowledge about the religion in informal, non-pressing ways. The Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change (TTM) (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983) may be applied to analyze the behavior through which people transform from tourists to actual members of the religious community via a set of behavior changes. The objective of this study was to test the applicability of this concept previously found (Bence-Kiss, 2020) on two countries, which have not been part of the initial research: France and Italy. Online content analysis, observations and in-depth interviews were applied to identify the general structure of the religious community in each countries; and the results were compared to the previous findings, confirming that the two-step model and TTM may also be applied to analyze the involvement into Krishna Consciousness in these countries as well.